Magazine Archive

We’ve lost our taste for cooking, and with it the pleasures of sharing food with family and friends. We’ve been told industrial food is quicker, cheaper, and tastier. Turns out that’s wrong. Here’s how we rediscover the joy of real food, spiced with love and tradition.

Our houses, our dumpsters, our lives overflow with stuff. It’s so cheap, how can you not buy yet one more thing that will surely make your life better? But it’s only cheap if we ignore the hidden costs to humans and to the Earth. Here’s how to fix our broken relationship with stuff.

We’ve never faced bigger threats to our well-being and to the health of
our planet. Accepting that reality could be paralyzing. Meet the people
who are, instead, moving forward with love, imagination, and renewed
respect for the Earth.

What if we all owned and oversaw the banks, by vote, and had a say in decisions made by retailers where we shop? What if we ran our workplaces without corporate CEOs? Here are stories of companies and communities where business is done by the people, for the people.

Industrial societies have spent several centuries trying to conquer nature. Instead, we’ve produced mass extinctions, climate change, and pollution. What’s a better way for humans to live on Earth? Nature is telling us, if only we would listen.

The body has become a political, economic, and cultural battleground. Big pharma, agribusiness, the health care industry, and the political right try to shape the choices we have about our health and our bodies. Here are ways we can take charge.

The mess left by the real estate crash isn’t cleaned up yet; many are still losing their homes. But here and there people are rewriting the rules of ownership, changing their expectations about what “home” means, and creating houses that are affordable and sustainable.

Corporate power is behind the politics of climate denial, Wall Street bailouts, union busting, and media consolidation, to name just a few. And policies advocated by the 1 percent are bankrupting the middle class. But actual people have power, too. Here are some of their most successful strategies.

The jobs crisis has slipped off the political radar, but to ordinary Americans, jobs and the economy are top issues. How can we build strong local economies that sustain us in an era of ecological limits? What can we do to support each other in challenging times, and how can we rebuild the American Dream?

The United States locks up more people than any other country, but that hasn't made us safer. The drug war jails thousands of nonviolent addicts. Taxpayers and poor communities lose as states slash social programs to pay for prisons. There's a better way—compassion, not punishment; restoration, not isolation. It's less costly, more humane—and it works.

Too often, we forget the biological truth that humans are an animal species, too. Our culture treats animals as food, pets, pests, property, and curiosities. We’ve spoiled their habitats, endangering tens of thousands of species and our own future. If we learn to understand animals, we can protect and restore the planet we all share.

It was never easy for families to make it on their own. As the economy becomes more turbulent and America diversifies, many people are embracing new family values. We are learning to care for, love, and bring into our families people who come from different cultures or ethnicities, are gay or straight, are blood relatives or relatives by choice.

How do you navigate an unsteady economy, a future without cheap oil, and unimaginable changes in the climate? Here are ways to learn skills for self-reliance, build lasting communities, and take care of the important things in life, whether good times or hard times come our way.